Merge Personal projects and Team projects in one schedule

[Joachim Wilke]

I am currently using Dashboard with several personal projects. I have a fixed time budget for all these projects but I am flexible how much time of my budget I can spend for each project each week. As a result, I have created a single Task-and-Schedule which includes all these projects. This works great!

I did now join a Project Team as a team member. This created a second Task-and-Schedule which contains all task of this project but none of my personal projects. Now I'm required to split my time budget in advance and maintain two schedules.

I would prefer to have one single list with all my tasks (personal and team project tasks) where I can prioritize and order the tasks using one common schedule. I experimented by adding personal projects to the Team Task-and-Schedule but this exposed personal details to the project leader. I also tried moving the team project to my personal Task-and-Schedule, but this gave an error when requesting a team-rollup because the schedule isn't available to the team leader.

Any idea how to solve this issue? Your help is greatly appreciated!

[David Tuma]

It sounds like you have discovered how flexible the dashboard's EV tracking can be. As you noticed, it IS possible to create a single schedule which combines team and personal work, and use that schedule to budget your time flexibly. But as you've noticed, that approach will publish information about your personal tasks to your team leader.

Why does it do that? Since you've made those "private" tasks part of the EV schedule, the EV calculations (for planned/forecast dates, etc) cannot be calculated (for the purposes of the team rollup) if those "private" tasks were missing.

Keeping your private tasks private requires keeping two separate schedules, and then making a decision about how much time you plan to budget each week to personal work and team project work. But this is a natural consequence of planning: an EV schedule is a way of producing a plan that helps you make a commitment (each person committing to the team, and the team committing to your stakeholders). If you merge your team and personal work into a single EV schedule, you are effectively not making any commitment to your team members about how much time you plan to spend on team project work on a weekly basis. As a result, if you fall behind it wouldn't be obvious whether (a) there is a real problem caused by not enough task hours per week, or (b) things are artificially ahead or behind as a result of random changes in the relative order of team-vs-personal tasks.

So keeping two schedules really is the best option. Fortunately, there is something you can do for a small bit of added convenience. In your personal dashboard, you can choose "C > Task & Schedule," click the "New" button, and create a new "EV Rollup." Then add your team and your personal schedule to this rollup. You'll still have two separate schedules, but you can look at the reports and charts for this rollup if you like to see how you are doing with your overall work.